Moscow chokes, drivers fume in mammoth traffic jams
Tue Oct 25, 2005
By Oliver Bullough
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Malkhaz Katamadze nudged his black Volga forward, stopped and sighed. He is one of the 3 million people who drive into Moscow every day and, like everyone else, he spends hours in traffic jams.
"It gets worse and worse, there are so many cars. People have got richer and richer in Moscow. Now a husband has a car, his wife has a car, and his teen-age son will get a car when he's old enough," he said as he glowered at the Peugeot in front.
Some 20 minutes and 600 yards of conversation later, he had calmed down a bit.
"This road was like this 100 years ago, and will be just the same 100 years from now. It can't be changed," he said, gesturing at one of the leafy and broad, but hopelessly clogged, boulevards of Moscow's historic center.
Moscow's booming economy, fueled by sky-high oil prices, has allowed Russians to indulge in consumer spending impossible in Soviet times. Cars are at the top of their shopping lists.
Although only one in 10 Russians owns a car, car sales are booming and analysts expect them to reach around 2 million a year by 2008, up from 1.6 million now. Soviet citizens owned around 8 million private cars 15 years ago.
Show rooms for the world's smartest brands dot the central streets of the capital, while less prestigious models are sold further out.
WALKING PACE
But the sheer quantity of cars, combined with a general disregard for parking and traffic laws means the new cars all too often go slower than walking pace.
"We already have 3 million cars in Moscow and we get another 200,000 every year. We need to build more roads. We have a deficit now of 220 miles." said Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov in a recent interview in daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
Moscow's traffic system is based around roads radiating from the center which means a whole section of the city can be paralyzed by a major traffic jam.
Retirees managed to effectively cut off the city's main airport in January by blocking one of the major radial roads when protesting against benefits reform.
Luzhkov has already built or completed two ring roads for the city in an attempt to alleviate the problem and city hall is discussing whether Moscow needs another, but drivers say less dramatic changes would be the real solution.
"The roads, the streets and the 1980s-era parking facilities -- none of then were built with this (many cars) in mind," said Viktor Pokhmelkin, deputy in the State Duma lower house of parliament and head of the "Russian Drivers' Movement."
He said sloppy policing, poor planning and a lack of government commitment had prevented any meaningful modernization of the roads, which tend to be lined with randomly parked cars that can reduce traffic to a trickle. There is also a chronic lack of underground parking facilities.
"The Moscow roads are fairly wide, but they become narrow because there are cars parked all along both sides. The Moscow government has not taken steps to supply parking places for these drivers," he said.
"The traffic police were not trained to work in such difficult conditions and also they are sadly here to make money, not to improve things."
BLUE FLASHING LIGHTS
Moscow drivers get particularly angry about traffic police stopping a row of cars to let a top official with a flashing blue light through first, but environmentalists say they should be more concerned about the pollution the cars generate.
Moscow's sky is often all but invisible through the smog and the air along major roads sticks in the throats of pedestrians -- something Alexei Kokorin of the WWF environmental group said is caused by the inefficient engines of old Russian cars.
"Dangerous emissions from new cars are hundreds or sometimes a thousand times lower than from old cars. This is true above all of trucks. The most polluted parts of town are the ring road and the roads to the center that the trucks use," he said.
He said the main solution was to keep cars moving, by improving the traffic police and streamlining regulations.
"In the end I think we will see a self-regulating process. Lots of people will not come into the center because of the traffic jams," he said.
But drivers suggested the time when Muscovites would voluntarily leave their cars behind and use the city's public transport system was a long way off.
"Look at this, it's completely empty up ahead but those three morons have stopped for no reason," said Dmitry Shevchuk, 25, as his Lada sat motionless on the "Garden Ring" inner ring road, where all 12 lanes were completely snarled up.
"But in a car you see, even if I'm sitting in a traffic jam like this, I feel like I'm my own man. It's not like that in the metro, you're being told what to do down there."
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